For any of your options except "cleave", assassination is ahead. You could optionally pick subtlety if your group is desperate for burst DPS on the adds, but if they're living for a while, assassination has the highest cheap sustained AoE, and if they're not, you can either sit on the boss through the adds or apply rupture to get your energy back on each add's death.

That is because of 2 aspects:
1. About 90 % time of the fight you have 5+ or just 1 target, in both cases assassination is our strongest spec.
2. Phase 2 is a burn phase where the boss takes more damage and has to go down, as quickly as possible. Combat can't do this and doesn't have an execute. Sub may be okay too.

Just a question though: I've looked through the top20 WoL logs and about 2/3 of the assa rogues use crimson tempest.
Where do you fit this in? If I try to keep at least 1 rupture up and my SnD through envenoms, I couldn't really use CT at all. I found it much smoother to just use FoK instead of mutilate/dispatch and do the same stuff as I would do single target style.

What I did was FOK and use the cps to apply Rupture to as many targets as you can. You should be able to have Rupture going on about three targets at once, and you will very high energy regen and do lots of damage FOK and poison damage. Also, Rupture/Venomous Wounds will do about 10% of your damage. Weave in CT but do not clip it.

Well I've managed about 145k in the end as we killed him, and I was on CC spear throwing duty. But I just can't see where energy for CT should come from and if its really a damage gain for Mut... mh :/

Here's a video from my assassination pov. I use CT, but in no way do I have perfect or even a good uptime of it. I mix in envenom and try to keep rupture up aswell. Like I said no splendid gameplay but I did rank 9th assass when this was recorded. Prob dropped alot now.

Depends on the amount of mobs, but generally it's SnD > Rupture x2-3 > CT/Envenom, using FoK as CP builder. The jury is still out on whether CT or Envenom is better, but the difference seems really small anyway. I personally sway towards Envenom in longer AOE fights as it gives me one less uptime to manage (SnD).

I really, really, really, REALLY, wish they'd introduce some kind of Mass-Rupture/Venomous Wounds finisher to support Assassinations current AOE-rotation(Or maybe just have Crimson Tempest proc Venomous Wounds as well). Manually applying Rupture is a massive pain in the ass, just too slow and ineffective, with massive ramp-up, and very little benefit. Never mind the fact that you'll never/very rarely get some actual use out of the "Energy return on death" aspect of Venomous Wounds in most raid situations, due to the massive ramp-up and energy required to perform a 5-point Rupture on a new target that will likely die in seconds anyway...

Look at Feral Druids, we're closely related to them in mechanics, seeing as we both utilize the same resource system(combo points and energy) so don't start any "apples and oranges"-crap, we're essentially the same class with a different take on damage distribution:
- Their Fan of Knives (Swipe) is an instant cast, like our FOK(except that it deals its full damage regardless of poison procs).
- The one drawback of Swipe is that it requires an active bleed on its target to do its full damage...
BUT HEY!
- Enter Thrash; a 50 energy AOE attack, causing all targets hit to bleed for 15 seconds! No cooldown.

They have an on-demand "AOE-Rupture" that allows them to use the full strength of their "FOK" for an endless amount of time. Which begs the question, why do we not...? Why can we not have an ability that makes Venomous Wound application trivial for AOE-scenarios? Why does FOK cost energy in the first place?

I seem to recall Elemental Shaman's had a similar system; They had to manually apply Fire Nova to several targets for an extended amount of time, which was highly ineffective, and ultimately got scrapped for the insanely overpowered Chain Lightning they now bolster.

I really, really, really, REALLY, wish they'd introduce some kind of Mass-Rupture/Venomous Wounds finisher to support Assassinations current AOE-rotation(Or maybe just have Crimson Tempest proc Venomous Wounds as well). Manually applying Rupture is a massive pain in the ass, just too slow and ineffective, with massive ramp-up, and very little benefit. Never mind the fact that you'll never/very rarely get some actual use out of the "Energy return on death" aspect of Venomous Wounds in most raid situations, due to the massive ramp-up and energy required to perform a 5-point Rupture on a new target that will likely die in seconds anyway...

Look at Feral Druids, we're closely related to them in mechanics, seeing as we both utilize the same resource system(combo points and energy) so don't start any "apples and oranges"-crap, we're essentially the same class with a different take on damage distribution:
- Their Fan of Knives (Swipe) is an instant cast, like our FOK, but it costs no energy.
- The one drawback of Swipe is that it requires an active bleed on its target to do its full damage...
BUT HEY!
- Enter Thrash; a 50 energy AOE attack, causing all targets hit to bleed for 15 seconds! No cooldown.

They have an on-demand "AOE-Rupture" that allows them to use the full strength of their "FOK" for an endless amount of time. Which begs the question, why do we not...? Why can we not have an ability that makes Venomous Wound application trivial for AOE-scenarios? Why does FOK cost energy in the first place?

I seem to recall Elemental Shaman's had a similar system; They had to manually apply Fire Nova to several targets for an extended amount of time, which was highly ineffective, and ultimately got scrapped for the insanely overpowered Chain Lightning they now bolster.

Rogue AOE'ing deserves a second look, I'd say.

Iirc there's was a point in time when CT bleeds benefitted from the energy regen via venomous wounds. Don't understand why this isn't so now. If they're worried about ale dmg going out of control why not limit the amount of targets effected by venomous wounds.

The thing is- we DO have a way to apply a bleed to everyone. Crimson Tempest is that bleed. This turns sub's SV boost on, for instance.

What we don't get is the energy regen from every target. Given that we aren't balanced around getting, say, N*X energy return, where N is the number of targets, this doesn't strike me as a big deal. If you have a rupture on one target, you'll get your normal amount of regen. With small target aoe, you get returns by building CPs with fans on a non-rupture target, then rupturing. I'm not sure where we switch into straight CT land, however.